Labs/Test Pilot/Test Proposals/Duplicate Tabs

Champion

Boriss

Question

How often do users open a duplicate tab, i.e. open a tab and go to a URL which they already have open in another tab?

Data

We don't collect URLs, so we will have to do duplicate tab detection on the client side.

The tricky part is telling apart accidental duplicates from intentional duplicates. We may be able to get useful data from seeing if users close a lot of the duplicates they open. Also, seeing how long tabs are open could help (if a bank website is open long enough for the session to expire and a new instance is open, chances are the duplicate is not intentional).

Also, if can learn how users place and position their tabs, that could help us determine if the User's actions are deliberate. For instance, is a small gmail tab is always visible as a small window in the upper left, it is more likely to be deliberate than a gmail tab buried in a window and forgotten for several hours while the user is active on other instances.

The Add-on "Tab Mix Plus" has a 'Duplicate Tab Grouping Feature' so it will reorder your Tabs (if 2 or more Pages are the same), this is handy for finding and closing them (I have over 100 Tabs most of the time). This action by "TM+" would need to be taken into account if you intend to make use of the Data to "tell apart accidental duplicates from intentional duplicates".

We could use existing Statistics (not our own) to guess that a user would not look at one Page for more than a few minutes without: moving the mouse, hitting a Key, using the scrollbar (if the Page is lengthy enough), or, going to a different Tab by any other means (Javascript causes pop-up without user intervention / Crash).